Languages of Sex and AIDS in Nepal: Notes on the Social Production of Commensurability

Abstract

There is little current information available on HIV prevalence in Nepal. -UN AIDS, Nepal: Epidemiological Fact Sheet on HIV/AIDS and SexuallyTransmitted Diseases. 1998.AIDS does not exist apart from the practices that conceptualize it. represent it, respond to it. We know AIDS only in and through those practices.-Douglas Crimp, i4/D5. Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism AIDS has been experienced in Nepal mostly as an expected epidemic. When epidemiologists in the late 1980s began warning that South Asia would soon be hit by an exponential increase in the rate of HIV infections, international donors moved to put prevention programs in place. The result in Nepal was a distinctive burst of relatively well-funded, concentrated AIDS awareness programs. The accompanying rise in publicity about AIDS far outstripped any collective, public awareness that anyone in Nepal might actually be suffering from AIDS. The publicity surrounding a few individuals with AIDS did little to challenge a pervasive sense of the remoteness of AIDS from Nepali life. 1 This relative invisibility of AIDS as illness in Nepal makes the visibility of organized prevention efforts of the 1990s remarkable. Public knowledge about AIDS in Nepal in the 1990s was being created, to an extraordinary degree, out of an already formed template of accepted facts about HIV, and the public health wisdom about AIDS prevention that accompanied that information, as set out by powerful international organizations. This means that Nepali health planners and activists, together with the public at large, encounter AIDS-as an idea, and for some, a physical realitythrough the mediation of an AIDS expertise that is already firmly consolidated. 2 This creates a situation that differs from the experience in the 1980s in places such as Haiti or East'Africa, when scientific knowledge was evolving rapidly. In the first decade of AIDS, the effects of AIDS on bodies and lives Cultural Anthropology 16(4)481-541.

Anticipation: Technoscience, life, affect, temporality

“…The anticipatory regime enables structured responses to crises that are not simply predicted but already made real. Anticipated 'crises' become the model and the 'event' that demands immediate response via health security measures which generate equivalent financial demands in their wake (Pigg, 2008). Investment in the deployment of security systems replaces investment in the improved health of nations; eradication of risky behaviors (raising chicken or cattle) replaces eradication of viral or bacterial pathogens (Hickler, forthcoming).…”

Ecosystem approaches to health and knowledge-to-action: towards a political ecology of applied health-environment knowledge

“…STS scholarship on the co-production of science and social order (Jasanoff 2004) would be invaluable in supporting such processes, as would the actual participation of STS scholars -likely ones working in an 'engaged program' that explicitly seeks to promote better, more equitable models of science-society interaction (Sismondo 2008). Postcolonial research on how health science 'travels' in North-South interaction (Anderson 2014;Brisbois 2014;Crane 2013;Pigg 2001) could also provide theoretical and methodological guidance for examining interactions such as Canada-Latin America ecohealth collaborations. For example, the complicated journey to the Puyango basin of neuro-behavioral tests developed in global North settings, where electricity and prescription glasses are readily available, hints at some of the dynamics of such travels.…”

The Feminist Foundations of Language, Gender, and Sexuality Research

“…However, feminist linguistic scholarship in postcolonial settings is growing, offering the possibility of dialogue and theoretical convergence as the field continues to develop. Relevant studies include work on gender and creole languages (Escure 2001;Meyerhoff 2004), gender and multilingualism in postcolonial societies (Sadiqi 2008;Walters 1999); gendered representations of the colonized Other (Irvine 2001;Mills 1991); and clashing Western and local discourses of sexuality and gender in public health and development efforts (Clark 2006;Pigg 2001). Some of this work also makes common cause with material feminist linguistic scholarship concerned with gendered processes of globalization (McElhinny 2007;Piller and Takahashi 2006).…”